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Hundreds of people became sick from eggs contaminated with salmonella last month. Recent FDA reports describing squalid conditions on one major Iowa egg farm linked to the outbreak explain why.
Inspectors noted numerous violations, including live non-chicken birds on feed bins and air vents, 4-8 feet high piles of manure, rodents and rodent burrows, chickens climbing piles of manure, live and dead flies “too numerous to count” and maggots “too numerous to count” on and around eggs, feed and walkways, among other things.
FDA laboratories also tested samples from manure, a walkway, a feed mill, and feed, which all came out positive for salmonella.
The FDA had imposed new, stricter standards on egg farms just a month prior to the outbreak. The inspection reports show that none of the responsible farms had adhered to new safety rules.
“The decrepit conditions in these hen houses reflect the fact that companies know that FDA inspections are so rare—even following the adoption of a new safety regulation—that there is no urgency to fix their buildings and their operations to assure compliance with FDA statutes and regulations,” said the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety advocacy group, said in a statement.
The FDA says it is engaged in ongoing communications with the company, Wright County Egg, to “ensure that appropriate preventive measures are put in place to reduce the risk of recurrence.”
